Rivington Was Ours Read online

  “Are you finished here?” she said. “Because I’m going home.” Guy hopped back behind the bar. He didn’t want to miss this.

  “Sure. Yeah. Work alright tonight? Looked busy.”

  “Fine. But I’m leaving now.”

  Guy intervened. “Nikki. You wanna stay for a Heineken? It’s on me.”

  “No. I’m leaving.”

  “Okay. Let’s go,” I said. I stood up.

  “Oh, now you’re coming with me?”

  “I’ve been waiting for you this whole time!” Tomorrow. We need to have tomorrow. Our entire relationship is Sundays. “Sunday Funday awaits.”

  When we stood up to leave I felt a tug at my sleeve. I turned around and saw the little singer again. “Guess what? Guess what?” Gaga bounced when she spoke, her hair jostling on top of those heavy lashes. “That was my producer! We’re going to record! I’ll make you a copy!”

  Nikki dropped her purse back on the bar. “You know what?” She turned to Guy. “I’ll take that beer. Stella.” Now I’m on a double date with my girlfriend on a Saturday night. I take what I can get.

  Guy delivered that beer to Nikki and then became distracted by a small coterie of drunk girls over by the corner. I started talking to Nikki again, the time between us blossoming inside of me like a winter flower. I kept an eye out for that underage girl, now all alone as I heard about Nikki’s day and Guy laughed at the coterie’s stories. Gaga couldn’t be more than twenty. I remembered being her age and all I wanted was everything. From the corner of my eye I saw Guy in deep, charismatic laughter with the drunk girls. He had a certain charm to him.

  The underage girl looked a little lost. Even her own boyfriend didn’t have time for her. Her with the big news of the night. My heart went out to her and I asked if she’d like a drink.

  She smiled. “Bud Light?”

  “What’s that, ‘Bugbite’?” Guy interrupted every time we started talking. This time to accuse her of slurred speech. “Maybe you’ve had enough to drink tonight, there, Bugbite.”

  Funny. I hadn’t noticed her acting drunk before. And she hadn’t taken a drink since I got there.

  Just then Nikki posted the bottle on her beer mat, white suds ringing the empty bottom. “Okay. Now I’m ready to go now.”

  “Are you leaving?” The underage girl smiled at Nikki and then turned to me. “I’ll text you when I have some more info on the record.”

  WE RODE HOME IN A silence known only to boyfriends and those in solitary confinement. The silence was punishment for a crime I’d readily confess to, just to end it. Whether guilty or not.

  “Look.” I put her bags on the bed and sat down on the couch when we got to her apartment on East Twenty-First. Francois, her chubby pug, nuzzled up against my leg with his asthmatic sweetness. Frank always took my side. “He’s just causing drama. And yes—I got that girl’s number. But she’s a singer and—ow!” Something sharp hit me in the chest. I looked down and saw a copper set of house keys.

  The dog got up on all fours, growling.

  “From now on you have a set of keys.”

  “Okay.” This was good news. Right? That hurt a lot.

  “I mean, what if I lost mine and I couldn’t feed the dog? Or what if something happened to me?”

  “That’s fine.” This should have been a moment. “Is this mutual? I can get you a set of my keys, but they all say ‘Do Not Duplicate’ so . . . so I might be looking at prison time if we pull this off. But I’ll do it. For you.”

  She walked over and sat with me. “Don’t leave me alone with him anymore.” She poked my chest right where the keys hit.

  “Oh, Guy? He’s harmless. He’s so protective of that girl.” Frank looked up at me with his big brown marble eyes.

  “When that girl went out to answer the phone she caught him hitting on me outside. He got all embarrassed and I thought he’d stop, but then apparently you got her number? You know when he shut the door after yelling at you? You know what he did? He leaned over while his girlfriend was on the phone and goes, ‘Can you believe that? Your boyfriend is hitting on my girlfriend in there and she gave him her number right in front of us. You know what we should do? We should teach them a lesson right now, don’t say a word to them. Let’s go back to my place, just you and me. That’ll show ’em.’”

  You can’t stop what you can’t end

  I’d like to say that was the only time he tried anything like that, but I also like to tell the truth.

  GUY HAD CALLED ME JUST days before to come DJ his all-night, all-hard-rock New Years Eve party at St. Jerome’s. Ten P.M. until a brutal, eyestrain-inducing eight A.M. St. Jerome’s had a small DJ booth on a two-foot-tall stage in the blacked-out window by the door. A black velvet curtain hung from the waist-high mixing table to the platform. I’d been told to expect another DJ just before midnight, who would then take over. He arrived in a haze. His body and eyes rippled like a reflection of himself in a shallow puddle. He rubbed his temples as he crammed his swaying frame into the DJ booth with me. He squinted, wincing every time the disco ball shined in his nodding, bloodshot eyes. Originally he had canceled so he could go to an early party, but now he wanted to do at least a few hours. Namely, the best hours from midnight on. And now here he was.

  I could tell he’d made it to that early party.

  His big head bobbed around as if his feet were glued to the dashboard of a Chevy Nova. He faced the window with his back to the crowd. “I think I did the mix wrong.”

  I pulled my headphones off. “You haven’t started yet.”

  “Can you take oxycodone and Ritalin together?”

  “I really wouldn’t.” Drugs, you see, I did not do. Drugs were for losers and I was on my way to being a big famous novelist. I did, however, share a journalist’s idle curiosity for the drug world. I thought it would have been really cool and really, like, writerly to have a big drug habit or some kind of encyclopedic, functional addiction. Especially considering my sleep habits and work schedule. All the really hardcore drug addicts I knew had big holes in their lives, chasms they shoveled pills and powders into like gravel into a pothole. Drugs didn’t work on me like that.

  Even then I wouldn’t recommend mixing cancer surgery painkillers with children’s attention deficit meds.

  “How much would you give me just to do the whole night?” the DJ said. “Like I’ll do an hour and we can split it.” This former reporter noted that the drug user maintained a concern for money, which could be turned into more drugs.

  “You want fifty percent of the money for doing ten percent of the night.”

  “No, I—” He looked as though he needed to pause and contemplate what God might be thinking right now. “I gotta go. Can you just do it?”

  He grabbed his records and left a bag of white powder on the empty, spinning turntable. With five seconds’ warning I grabbed the New York Dolls’ “Personality Crisis” and threw the track on. I matched it with “Teenage Depression,” Eddie Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody,” and, for the kids, “Summer of ‘69.” The whole room was air guitars and sing-alongs and our collective triumph over the broken promises of 2006. We were over it, we were moving on. But tonight we were having breakup sex with the year.

  Just then one of the dancers came behind the short velvet curtain between the turntables and the top of the stage. She nudged my calf. “Did he leave the bag?” I looked down and she rubbed her nose to illustrate. I handed her the bag.

  At midnight Guy cut the music from behind the bar and called out, “Ten! . . . Nine! . . . Eight! . . .” I threw on Andrew W.K.’s “I Love NYC.”

  We were dancing and singing along, hugging strangers. Nikki came to the booth for a kiss. We were on a first date with the New Year, nervous and excited. Get ready for us, 2007!

  Throughout the night I found that people on the way out to smoke delighted in powdering their nose at my feet. Bent over with the black velvet curtain draped over their necks and shoulders, they looked like old-timey camera operator
s.

  At about 7:45 A.M., when none of us could fit another Jameson shot in our livers, Guy turned up the lights. I told Nikki I could meet her at her house. She decided to stay. While I cleaned up my records and needles and equipment, a go-go dancer we called Jackie Daniels came over to the DJ platform and stuck her head in the curtain. I really liked Jackie’s fun-loving spirit, but after ten hours in the booth I really wanted to get home. Instead of feeling like a rock star at that moment after a great night, I felt more like a roadie. I had to coil up wires and clean up while everyone around me partied. “Hey,” she said.

  “I don’t have any more.”

  “I wasn’t coming in here for that. I just wanted to see that you’re okay.”

  I crouched down to her level as she peered through the curtain beneath the turntables. “I’m fine. Very tired though.”

  “Everyone did a lot of drugs tonight and I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

  “Yes. Thanks, I—” I then realized how wasted she was.

  “What?”

  Her eyes had emptied. Something kept her body awake but not her mind. “Hang on, hang on, hang on.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Am I okay?”

  “Look. It’s time to go home. I gotta pack up.”

  I stood up and put my records away.

  WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW WAS that when Jackie came to check on me in the DJ booth that night, Guy leaned over the bar toward Nikki and pointed at the booth as the sequined bloomers on the hindquarters of a go-go dancer hung out the back of the curtain. At that moment, my head ducked beneath and did not resurface for minutes.

  “Look at that.” Guy shook his head at Nikki and then walked away to finish cleaning. “You gotta keep an eye on your man.”

  Coming out of my cage and now I’m doing just fine

  Despite his best efforts, Guy and I became friends. My weeks had a new rhythm to them. Although I had a set of keys to Nikki’s house, I would come downtown after work and wait for her somewhere in the Lower East Side. I even started to pick up regular Friday nights at St. J’s. And when I didn’t I came down anyway and loved getting lost in conversation with that Gaga girl, who turned out to be much brighter than I’d first assumed. With everyone else she acted a bit silly and young, like a girl in town from Long Island, but the more I knew her the more I realized she had an innate social intelligence that made her approachable to everyone from the fawning door guys to the idiot party kids I loved. Gaga’s genius was in her ability to mirror those around her, like the disco ball glass she glued to her outfits. If you thought she was a bit dumb, it was probably because she thought you were not that bright and didn’t try to say anything over your head. One night she came in with some of her friends from college. I was surprised to find out she had dropped out of NYU, because she used to act like she wasn’t smart enough to get in. The only friends I’d made in college were Shakespeare, Dante, hooks, Joyce, Proust, Freud, Lacan, Picasso, Tzara, and Warhol. Gaga wanted to talk about them all as if they were old buddies from the dormitory. Some days Nikki would get out of work and find Gaga and I up to our ankles in theory.

  She was like the little sister I never had. Eager to play, happy to listen. Nikki was almost ten years older than her and the two of them never got on easy with each other. But for those lonesome hours before Nikki got out of work, I always had a friend downtown.

  BY THAT TIME I WAS three years into my residency at Beauty Bar on Fourteenth Street. It was a marvelous and welcoming place in the same location as the old Thomas Beauty Salon—old-lady hairdryer chairs as banquettes and two red leather barber chairs right in the front window. During the afternoon you could listen to great music and get a martini and a manicure for ten dollars. When I first moved to New York City I DJ’d every joke club that would hire me. The dance clubs said I was too rock ’n’ roll and the rock ’n’ roll clubs (each of them territorial and disappearing every day) said I played too much disco. I just wanted to make the girls dance. Everywhere I called would say, “Where do you spin?” I knew that the best DJs in the city—the serious record collectors who were generous with their libraries—all played at Beauty Bar. And I wanted to be one of them. Mike Stewart, the owner, gave me that shot and I’ll never forget it. He was patient with me when I first started out, always kind to the friends of mine who showed up. And he even didn’t mind when I didn’t have enough records to do a whole set and had to play songs twice.

  No matter what kind of drama went on in the LES, I still always had a home on Fourteenth Street where I could sit and wait for an adventure to find me any night of the week.

  But tonight would be our best.

  Before a party, you get to a moment where you’ve texted everyone in your phone, worked and reworked your guest list, made all of the arrangements with the bar, made the set times for the DJs. The day of your party, you spend your time running around, getting things together, barely eating. If you’re not answering emails, you are staring at the screen, willing it to just refresh one more goddamn time.

  There comes a point where you cannot add anything to the flyer or call a single other person. That night I was extra nervous because of the deal I cut with the people downtown at Motor City, just below Rivington Street. I said they only had to pay if I broke the all-time ring at the cash register.

  On the way to the party I crept through the squeaky door of Beauty Bar on Fourteenth Street to pick up a few records I had left there. One of the perks of being a resident DJ there was I could keep a crate of records in the booth. The bartender smiled at me as I came through the door. “Is it true?” she asked.

  “Is what true?”

  “Is it true you are throwing the Killers’ after-party at Motor City?”

  “Yes.”

  “How on earth did you get them?”

  “They’re really excited! Promised the party wouldn’t be a big deal.”

  SECOND AVENUE BEARS DOWN ON the East Village with a running start for 128 numbered blocks, counting down from East Harlem until it T-bones Houston Street. Even Second Avenue doesn’t want to go to the Lower East Side. At Fourteenth Street it begins a lifeless stretch of busy streets and half-empty cafés. I weaved through the side streets hoping that if I walked faster and zigzagged I would accomplish something. Then I could shake this feeling.

  For backup tonight I had asked Jackie Daniels and Conrad, the go-go dancer and door guy from New Years, to team up with me. We had our eyes on doing a weekly party together. They were dating and had an apartment around the corner on Clinton Street inside of what used to be the lobby of an old Yiddish playhouse.

  I didn’t tell them about the gamble I’d made with the management.

  We walked through the end of the numbered streets in the East Village to Houston Street. Even at night a line formed at Katz’s Deli on the corner of Ludlow. This was the deli made famous by an eighties movie about fake orgasms and why men and women cannot be platonic friends. As I walked I peeked in on the Saturday night scene at Dark Room and tried to see whom we might recognize in the windows of Max Fish and Pink Pony. Many of the nicer shops and boutiques had lowered their graffitied shutters, their ulcerous mail slots rusting away, preserving the abandoned, lawless feel of the neighborhood. At the next block I peeked over at Stanton Social and hoped to catch a glimpse of Nikki inside. I crossed the street again at Pianos and everybody outside asked, “Are the Killers really coming to your party?”

  Yes. We are really throwing the Killers’ after-party as soon as they finish up at Madison Square Garden. No. We have no idea if they are coming.

  I WALKED IN THE DOOR of Motor City, a Detroit-themed bar with muscle-car art on the walls and murals to the great American automakers. The bartender’s bottle opener dangled from the ceiling on a black air-compressor coil. Just above the center of the room a disco ball hung still and malcontent, a bright light beaming off its stationary mirrors. The sphere budged with every gust of wind that came through the door when someone walked in. The bright, unmo
ving lights that were spread all over the room looked back at you as you entered, unimpressed: What? What are you looking at?

  Nikki had to wait tables at Stanton Social and Gaga and Guy had tickets to the Killers. I wished Gaga were here just to have someone to talk to. In the early hours before a party gets going there’s nothing to do except drink and try not to play all your best songs.

  ALL ALONG LUDLOW STREET, A strange breed of haberdashers preyed on the drunk. Some guys sold flowers or drugs or empanadas. This one cute-in-a-dad-sorta-way Indian guy walked every night from Beauty Bar to Canal selling light-up crap like sunglasses and glow sticks. He always tried to entice young girls and then sell the toys to whatever boys they were with.

  Conrad walked out. “When’s Nikki coming?”

  “She’s pissed,” I finally admitted. “She hates what we’re doing.”

  “What?” Conrad said.

  “I don’t pretend to understand it. She just finds it annoying.”

  “I don’t see how what she’s doing is so virtuous. We’re making do and having fun and throwing a party. She’s fucking waiting tables. It’s a job.”

  Another haberdasher made his way over. “Flowers for your sweetheart? Flowers for your sweetheart?”

  Jackie took over in the DJ booth. I said, “If the Killers get here, just get them whatever they need. I’ve gotta take care of something.”

  A minute later I walked into the upstairs lounge of Stanton Social, where I saw her in full Saturday-night mode. The host and the other waitresses saw me with a flower and a three-piece suit and smiled. I walked up to her at the computer terminal, but she ignored me, thinking me a customer who wanted to get the check or ask about my tab. I waited patiently.

  When she turned around I presented her with the single declawed rose.